For people who worked hard at school - what did you do?

[Hthwo]

I coasted in a major way, and underachieved. Basically all the way through to my final year at university.

DD1 is much more conscientious - does her homework for a start, and wants to be a good student. However she is still coasting a bit, doesn’t revise for tests etc. She is starting year 10 and says herself she doesn’t really know how to step it up for GCSEs. I don’t know how to help her - not sure if the school will spend much time on the topic.

Any advice?

My daughter struggled with learning vocab in foreign languages until we tried associating words with actions, or singing them.

Making audio is one of the best ways of learning vocab that I have found. Record with repetitions and then listen until you can recite from memory. It’s useful as you can combine listening with exercise/travel.

There are lots of revision apps they can download.

Mine found the Quizlet app really useful, especially for MFL.
They had it on their phones so, if they had a spare ten minutes, they’d do a quiz, or look at the flash cards, or listen to audio of their notes.

There are also some great you tube channels, which suited my eldest e.g. Primrose Kitten

They had revision guides as soon as they started their GCSE courses. We were advised to buy exam board specific guides e.g. AQA, Edexcel, but also had the CGP ones.

Youngest learnt from watching eldest that little and often, from the very start, was going to be the less stressful way to do things!

We told them that the key to doing their best was to ask questions and work consistently in school.

My DCs made revision cards as they went along.